Detecting unsustainable pressures exerted on biodiversity by a company. Application to the food portfolio of a retailer

Wolff, Anastasia; Gondran, Natacha; Brodhag, Christian

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.08.057

Cited by 43 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Examples of applications of PBs to LCA exist, in which some impact categories have been addressed. For instance, Wolff et al (2017) evaluated the absolute environmental sustainability of a food retail company located in France, putting the LCA results for 16 impact categories in perspective of the PBs. Ryberg et al (2018b) applied the PB-LCIA method to an industry case study, highlighting the relevance of allocation methods for downscaling PBs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

Sala

Crenna

Secchi

et al. 2020

Journal of Environmental Management

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The planetary boundaries (PBs) represent a well-known concept, which helps identify whether production and consumption systems are environmentally sustainable in absolute terms, namely compared to the Earth's ecological limits and carrying capacity. In this study, the impacts of production and consumption of the European Union in 2010 were assessed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA)-based indicators and compared with the PBs. Five different perspectives were adopted for assessing the impacts: a production perspective (EU Domestic Footprint) and four distinct consumption perspectives, resulting from alternative modelling approaches including both top-down (input-output LCA) and bottom-up (process-based LCA). Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) results were assessed against LCIA-based PBs, which adapted the PBs framework to the LCIA indicators and metrics of the Environmental Footprint method (EF). Global environmental impacts transgressed several LCIA-based PBs. When assessing the overall environmental impacts of EU consumption compared to the global LCIA-based PBs, impacts of EU consumption related to climate change, particulate matter, land use and mineral resources were close or already transgressed the global boundaries. The EU, with less than 10% of the world population, was close to transgress the global ecological limits. Moreover, when downscaling the global PBs and comparing the impacts per capita for an average EU citizen and a global one, the LCIA-PBs were significantly transgressed in many impact categories. The results are affected by uncertainty mainly due to: (a) the intrinsic uncertainties of the different LCA modelling approaches and indicators; (b) the uncertainties in estimating LCIA-based PBs, due to the difficulties in identifying limits for the Earth's processes and referring them to LCIA metrics. The results may anyway be used to define benchmarks and policy targets to ensure that consumption and production in Europe remains within safe ecological boundaries, as well as to understand the magnitude of the effort needed to reduce the impacts.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

Sala

Crenna

Secchi

et al. 2020

Journal of Environmental Management

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“…The food-processing sector is the first industrial sector in France in terms of turnover (172 billion € in 2017) and the second industrial sector in terms of job (420 000 jobs in France in 2017) and represents about 17 647 companies in 2017 (ANIA, 2018). It also exerts unsustainable pressures on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity because of its contributions to climate change, pollutions and habitat loss ((Wolff et al, 2017), (Crenna et al, 2019). Because of its high-level stakes both in terms of economic, social and environmental issues, it was decided to focus on the food-processing sector for the quantitative survey of this study.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Palacios-Argüello

Gondran

Nouira

et al. 2020

Journal of Cleaner Production

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The purpose of this paper is to identify which environmental criteria can influence the product demand in a context of business-to-business. These criteria can be related to the product's environmental characteristics, to the organization strategies or green practices developed by the firms and to the supplier selection process. Building the conceptual framework from the literature review, a set of environmental criteria were extracted, selected and validated. These criteria were used as a basis for the definition of a questionnaire survey that was sent to 5820 professionals from the food industry in France. The analysis of the 248 complete answers shows that the environmental characteristics of the product can influence product's demand. The most influential attribute to improve the product's environmental quality that increases the product's demand is the introduction of organic labelled raw materials. Besides, the practices that influence mostly the product demand are related to the geographical proximity with the stakeholders. Moreover, the results show that the most important selection criterion when choosing a supplier is the importance given to the quality and environmental performance of components offered. Hence, we show that in the French food market, as opposite to what is usually assumed in many research works, the carbon emissions yield during the production process and transportation process have still no significant impact on products' demand. Lastly, in this work, we quantify the demand increase that company can achieve when enhancing the environmental quality of its products. We show that the impact of the enhancement of those criteria on the demand can have different aspects. 55.6% of respondents advocate for a demand increase and most of them (33.6%) estimate this increase between 5 and 10% of the initial demand. Finally, some respondents (4.8%) indicate that the enhancement of environmental quality does not necessarily increase the demand. However, without efforts to enhance the environmental quality of their products, the demand can decrease. These findings allowed concluding that the business-customers are becoming more and more exigent by privileging organic labelled and local products and making that the companies analyse the geographical proximity with the stakeholders as a key factor during the selection process. We provide companies managers in food industry with better understanding about the environmental criteria that increase the products demand helping them to target the right decisions and to be efficient in their process of environmental quality enhancement. We also assess and try to quantify and give an estimation about the demand evolution regarding the enhancement of product's environmental quality. Our findings are also helpful for Operational Research community.

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“…La définition de « budgets écologiques par personne » n'est pas la seule méthode aujourd'hui proposée pour allouer les capacités de charge d'un milieu aux différentes entités (industries, ménages, commerces, par exemple) bénéficiant de l'écosystème concerné. Certains travaux comme ceux de Stewart et Deodhar (2009), Sandin et al (2015), Wolff et al (2017) et Ryberg (2018) proposent différentes méthodes d'allocation et de répartition des seuils écologiques basés sur différents principes (poids économique, responsabilité historique, valeur du service rendu à l'homme, par exemple) afin de définir des références de normalisation. Cet article s'inscrit dans ce débat sur les méthodes de répartition des capacités de charge des écosystèmes dans le temps, l'espace et entre entités de natures différentes.…”

Section: Resultsunclassified

Vers une évaluation absolue de la durabilité écologique : quelle variabilité des valeurs de référence associées à l'écotoxicité aquatique ?

Kambou¹,

Gondran²,

Wolff³

et al. 2018

Environnement, Ingénierie &Amp; Développement

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Detecting unsustainable pressures exerted on biodiversity by a company. Application to the food portfolio of a retailer

Cited by 43 publications

References 54 publications

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

Which is the relationship between the product’s environmental criteria and the product demand? Evidence from the French food sector

Vers une évaluation absolue de la durabilité écologique : quelle variabilité des valeurs de référence associées à l'écotoxicité aquatique ?

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